What Am I Doing Wrong?

[atacam]

Below is a pic of my setup for taking pics of minis. The three lamps all have daylight bulbs in. My minis still seem to come out a little dark. I am putting them through a photo program and enhancing them too. Any help would be greatly appriciated.
BTW the tripod is where my camerea sits. It is 13cm away from the minis.

 

[Mr.S.Marbo]

In my experience you need a ton of light. I find its best to work in a room with a big window on a sunny day AND use 2 lamps with daylight bulbs close.... Try and get the light from the window to illuminate it quite well and then put a lamp on it. I hold a second lamp quite close to the mini. Have the camera on a tripod taking the picture using the cameras\' self timer (if it has one).

If your camera allows you to adjust the ISO speed then you can do that to improve brightness. The higher the ISO value the brighter your pictures become when you are shooting in darker places. However, the lower your ISO the cleaner the image will be (the higher the ISO the more \"noise\" you will get in your picture) so try and balance the two. I am experimenting with this at the moment and have so far found an ISO of 100 or 200 is best with a lot of light. You may however find the pictures are acceptable with a higher ISO than 200. Have a go and tell me how it worked.

Best thing is to wait for a sunny day, and stick your mini right next to the biggest window you have so its nice and bright and then stick a couple lamps on it.....

Hope that was of some help.

 

[Vallan]

The first thing I see...

I doesn\'t look like there\'s much room for it, but you might lay the back ground down a bit more. A bit more sweep would help a bit and if you use the natural light from the window then turn the whole thing around or backlighting would be your problem. Even thick white paper or poster board lets light around or through to some point.
Hope this helps, I\'ll put a bit more thought into it and get back to you. BTW good question.
:flip::bouncy::flip:

 

[DennisMech]

Perhaps a different background? Recently jarret (shroud) used a grey background to very good effect, giving a much more real and less contrasty tone to the minis. I recently took a few pics, and found that the white backgroud was too strong against the mini. If you still want a white background when you post it, since you have an editing program, you could change that in there.

 

[TobiWan]

Originally posted by Mr.S.Marbo
In my experience you need a ton of light.

No. You just need enough light and what atacam has there is enough light.
I thought that one needs just more light, too, when all of my first mini pics came out much too dark. I took my father\'s 1000 watts (or so... your normal halogen desktop lamp has only 50 watts...) light source (he has a nice variety of photography equipment) and to my surprise the pics didn\'t come out any better.

Most digicams will automatically adjust the foreground brightness (e.g.) relative to the background. If the background is a blinding bright white then the camera will automatically darken the foreground (e.g. your mini) which is bad.
Use a light grey background instead - like DennisMech said. But this alone won\'t provide you with instant good pics either.

In reality it\'s really down to choosing the right manual settings with your camera.

I learned this through an article I found in the Warmachine forums and Shroud has the same article on his homepage: http://www.tinctureadept.com.

You have to play a bit with your settings and see what looks best on the computer monitor (the camera\'s display sometimes shows rather dark pics as if they are perfect).

Read the article mentioned above - it helps.

I have a Canon Powershot S30 and my desktop sports two 50 Watts halogens. I\'ve currently set my camera to F8.0, 1/15 and ISO 100 and the appropriate light color control setting. What kind of pic can I get with these settings?
Take a look HERE.
These pics are unaltered (at least brightness and contrast wise). The only thing I did was resizing them to 40% of the original and compiling the three pics together in one.

Have a nice day,
TobiWan

 

[Vallan]

There both right...

The color of your back ground does matter. Chern Ann has a article on photography and mini\'s on this site that suggests using a blue background. The two posts previous like the medium grey, and are right it would help. I remember a good bit of what I was taught when I shot weddings for a year. I was given several National Geopgraphic\'s with article\'s about how they shoot different scenes.
The one that comes to mind here is the one about shooting a Artic Fox. White animal on a white background. They suggest taking a reading off of a medium grey background with the same light and at the same distance as your subject would be (the mini). The camera uses a \"grey scale\" to adjust for brightness and contrast even in a manual camera. Kinda like a light meter except a light meter takes a reading at the subject and the camera takes a reading of what has reflected back off the subject and made it to the camera. The Canon AE-1 was what this particular photographer was using, same as mine. Using the F-stop and shutter speeds from the white background actually gives a false reading and darken the rest of the picture because the camera doesn\'t want to blow out the picture. So use the grey background settings with the white background and see how much it helps.

Told you I\'d get back to you.lol I think on it some more and try to find that article for exact quotes.
:flip::bouncy::flip:

 

[frenchkid]

Hey thanks
I never actually thought that with back ground caused such a problem but no I think I know why all my pictures came out kinda dark. Now I need to find a grey backgound without using all the ink in my printer cartridge.

 

[Daan]

You might also try using your camera\'s flash, but tape a bit of plain white paper over it. Works wonders for me.